Evaluating Clustering Meta-features for Classifier Recommendation

Data availability in a wide variety of domains has boosted the use of Machine Learning techniques for knowledge discovery and classification. The performance of a technique in a given classification task is significantly impacted by specific characteristics of the dataset, which makes the problem of choosing the most adequate approach a challenging one. Meta-Learning approaches, which learn from meta-features calculated from the dataset, have been successfully used to suggest the most suitable classification algorithms for specific datasets. This work proposes the adaptation of clustering measures based on internal indices for supervised problems as additional meta-features in the process of learning a recommendation system for classification tasks. The gains in performance due to Meta-Learning and the additional meta-features are investigated with experiments based on 400 datasets, representing diverse application contexts and domains. Results suggest that (i) meta-learning is a viable solution for recommending a classifier, (ii) the use of clustering features can contribute to the performance of the recommendation system, and (iii) the computational cost of Meta-Learning is substantially smaller than that of running all candidate classifiers in order to select the best.